MSDN Universal Gets Team Foundation Server 2005!!!

Thursday, May 12, 2005

I just got this from Tim Heuer, the MS Developer Evangelist for Phoenix,
and I thought I'd pass it along directly. It is really big news, IMO. Any
emphasis is mine.

It is not often that we receive direct
communication to the community from Corporate VP's at the big ship... but
yesterday we received one that contains great news regarding a situation of MS
listening to the feedback of the community and reacting. Below are
excerpts from a memo from Sanjay Parthasarathy (affectionately called "Sanjay
P"), who is the Corporate VP of .NET strategy (translation: "the
man").

<SanjayP_excerpts>We announced our product line and pricing in March,
significantly ahead of product availability. What we heard from customers time
and again was that they wanted Microsoft to provide as much advance notice as
possible regarding product changes. Since the March announcement, we have
received quite a bit of feedback about the SKU strategy, pricing and
licensing.

[You] have been an invaluable source of
input on these topics and we are taking action to respond to many of your
suggestions.

We will place a limited version of Team
Foundation Server in each edition of the Visual Studio Team System family
(Architects, Developers and Testers). This version will be restricted to a
maximum of five users and should serve the needs of smaller organizations.
Teams that have a need for more users should still find that Team
Foundation Server is significantly more cost effective than current source
code control solutions and offers tremendous value through its role as the
core of integration across all of the Team System.

To address the broader feedback on pricing, we
have also finalized promotional pricing around Team Suite to enable current
subscribers to more easily upgrade to the full Visual Studio product line.
Going forward into 2005, MSDN Universal customers will have three
choices:

»Universal subscribers that want all of the client
functionality of Team System will be able to upgrade to Team Suite by paying
just the incremental software assurance or renewal price for the duration of
their agreement. In retail, this amounts to around $2,300 and for most
customers this represents a 75% or more discount on the full price of Team
Suite. Volume customers will, of course, pay less.

»Universal subscribers who want Team Edition for
Software Architects, Team Edition for Software Developers, or Team Edition for
Software Testers will be able to upgrade at no additional cost. Each of
these "role Editions" includes the MSDN Premium Subscription.

»Universal subscribers who want the 2005 equivalent
of MSDN Universal can simply choose Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
with MSDN Premium Subscription and get the functional equivalent of MSDN
Universal for about 15% less than what they paid today.

</SanjayP_excerpts>

And people say Microsoft doesn't pay attention to feedback! This is great
news for small .NET shops who want to develop like the pros. Now there's more
reason than ever to join the Empower program for
ISVs (if you're an ISV, of course).

6 Comments

I agree with Juan, there needs to be more clear definition of the product lines for people who are consultants/microISVs

Too bad they didn't do anything about the three different editions (yet). For small shops and consultants this still isn't interesting and i think lots of people are still considering to move to Visual Studio 2005 Pro in combination with Subversion, AnkhSVN, Cruisecontrol, Nant and Nunit instead (and yes, i'm one of them).

So guess it's time to start the &quot;drop the three different hats&quot; campaign because it looks like the &quot;we want a lite version of team foundation server&quot; campaign has now been succesfully completed :)